Tuesday, 4 November 2014

Buying blues and selling sagas

This year has been pretty quiet on here. I’m not going to go into a big apology, as it’s getting a bit repetitive now!

The reason for my complete silence in 2014 has pretty much been down to one thing. One thing that I can safely say has taken up my whole year near enough.

I’ve bought a house and moved into my first home with my fiancé.

Wow, congratulations, I hear you say. Hm.

Yes, now we’re in our first home as a couple I can graciously accept any well wishes from people. However, there have been times this year that I seriously doubted if we’d ever get to this point. The amount of times I’ve heard ‘It’ll be worth it’ and ‘What will be will be’.

I’ve heard people say before, buying property is one of, if not the, most stressful thing you can do in life. Anyone else who has been in this position will agree with me, no truer word has been said. I’ve spent this year making myself ill with the whole drama.

We got engaged in December last year and quickly decided we needed to move into a home of our own before any wedding plans were made.

So 2014 was our year to move. Of course I already owned my flat so we needed to factor in selling that too.

I still to this day do not know what is the best way to go about buying and selling property. Should you put your home on the market first and then buy, or should you look around and secure somewhere and then sell? The market really does influence this.

We started this whole process in February this year, 9 whole months ago. I will need to go into detail into separate posts as to each different stage/element as there is too much to tell!

The market was ridiculous – we always seem to have a knack for timing things at the most hectic of times. There was the positive side that things were selling quick and at high prices, great news for selling my flat. However, when we came to view houses we were met with a lot higher asking prices than expected and by the time you saw them online and went to view them they had already been sold!

Dealing with estate agents and solicitors was by far the most horrendous part of the process. I have felt for months I’ve been juggling two jobs – acting as liaison between them all and as PA to my solicitors. My partner and I ended up bickering constantly through the stress and I vowed I would never move again.

It is funny, when I bought my flat, seven years ago, as a first time buyer, I thought that was a bit troublesome and remember at the time thinking the solicitor was so poor. Ah the naivety!

If I could go back and see my younger self I would tell myself how easy it all was and to embrace it and enjoy the fact the whole process took 3 months or less.

When you have something to sell as well it complicates things, when the property you are selling is a flat, it complicates it further. And if you own, but your partner doesn’t? Crank up that complication even more.

I feel like we’ve not had this year. I don’t remember key events or the seasons changing. The fact we’re in November doesn’t even feel real to me if I’m honest.

We’ve now been in our house for a month. The relief when we completed I cannot describe.

However, now of course, is the decorating and DIY.

The house is in relatively good condition so it’s not like we’re going all DIY-SOS. However, it seems once we do one thing I think of somewhere else to do. Plus we just started to feel a bit homely and now we’ve been decorating/having things fitted we are living in complete disarray again!

But of course, I know now, all I need to remember is those wise words ‘It’ll be worth it in the end’!